Solving puzzles faster than humanly possible
biggieblog.com
biggieblog.com
You’re graded on a few thing: efficiency in number of movements, efficiency in number of units, and efficiency in space.
Like real programming, you often have to sacrifice one or two to maximize the other.
Definitely a game most on HN would enjoy.
The player is tasked with creating products for clients, which involves constructing circuits and then writing code to run them.[4][5] The programming language used in the game is similar to assembly language and the circuit elements resemble simplified versions of real-world electronics.[1]
One of my all time favs
For example, area and cost oftentimes have very similar designs, except to minimize your cost you're going to be using a plain arm with tracks, but to minimize area you're going to be using an extendable arm.
The extendable arm costs 40 and can oftentimes be manipulated to use no extra space, whereas the plain arm costs 20 but if you need to use tracks they're just +5 each. But if you have to use a track you're definitely using extra area.
And cycle time is completely at odds with both area and cost. Using a single arm to do everything will never win on cycle time because a single arm can't keep up with how fast the game produces reagents - you need two arms for that.
I made an exception for N++, but even there I play it much less often than I otherwise would because I loathe the fact that I can't just double-click the game itself and go.
HA! Here was my experience just now:
1. Open N++ 2. Wait maybe 5 seconds with no visible update 3. Steam opens a very primitive, very non-Mac-like dialog, to inform me it's downloading an update to itself -- 195MB!? 4. Wait for that to finish 5. Another primitive dialog: updating Steam. Not the game -- Steam. 6. Update completes. It's been about a minute? since I tried to run N++ 7. Steam presents a "choose user" dialog. I'm the only user, WTH? 8. I choose myself. Steam asks me to log in. I didn't log out, it's the same computer, why should I have to log in again? 9. Password doesn't auto-suggest. 10. I don't remember my password. 11. I give up and hit cmd-Q 12. Steam doesn't quit 13. Check the menu. Quit is disabled 14. Force-quit Steam
Steam, you run other programs. That's all you do. You're bad at your job.
My experience mirrors that of gcanyon. I'm an extremely casual gamer. I play every few months a single-player game sometimes. I'm fine with that and I don't want to change it.
Steam sucks and makes me play less my games. Why?
This is how the "play game" experience worked in my childhood: I had the game installed. Found the icon of it on the desktop, or in the start menu. I clicked it. The game loaded and I was playing.
This is how the same thing works now with Steam. I start steam. I need to wait while it updates itself. Then I need to log in. (yes I'm using a password manager, it still sucks) Then I need to sort out the second factor. Then the game updates. (Sometimes I have to do some wrangling so the game I actually want to play updates first, instead of having to wait while all the other games update). And then I can play.
> All these extra steps are just a consequence of you extremely rarely opening it
Okay? So I should feel less bad? It sucks. Everything else is excuses.
Sometimes I have a few hours, and I think "hey maybe I could play something" then I remember how much it sucks and I just go and read a book. That's not a glowing endorsement for Steam.
Steam is acting as if it is Fort Knox. I understand that I would need to go through all of that before I can purchase a new game with a stored card. But I just want to play a game I already have, and have it installed and it is on my disk. So just get out of my way and let me play.
Steam and Valve are are pretty popular, in the absolute wasteland that is game launchers and gaming companies. Steam starts up reasonably quickly, and has pretty well thought out functionality for things like playing with your friends. Valve has nice sales, and contributes stuff like Proton (a nice wrapper around/extension of Wine, for Linux support).
That said, I think everyone who likes Steam/Valve should be able to imagine how you feel about it. Because that’s probably how they feel about stuff like the Epic launcher, and all those. It really ought not be that mysterious, we’ve all got different thresholds for what annoys us!
I understand, and appreciate that. My brother who is an avid gamer told me (i paraphrase here) “when i was young i used to play more games than i paid for, now i buy more games than I can play with” which is a big change. Steam is one of the big factors behind that. That is nothing sort of miraculous.
> we’ve all got different thresholds for what annoys us
That. But also i totally see that my usage pattern is different from most other users of it. I assume if i would play every day that would keep my “cookies” warm. And even if not, and i would still need to log in once every few months that would be a “rare hickup” as opposed to “every darn time i start this thing”. (Just because the baseline would shift.) So i totaly understand that. I also understand that from Valve’s perspective perhaps my usecase is not that lucrative. I just don’t bring in enough dough to make it worthwile to “fix” things for me. Especially when fixing my use case could perhaps lead to other indirect costs like more stolen steam accounts. (I don’t really know. I don’t have a full understanding of all of their security practices. What I am saying is that i can imagine that it is a tradeoff from their perspective. They could make the session system more forgiving but then they would suffer other consequences.)
I see all of that. But just because i understand those things i don’t have to pretend things are working well for me when they are not.
These update systems only have one good use case. If you are pretty much connected all the time. If you rarely run them. You are pretty much stuck in a update stack.
I even joke with my wife 'i am playing my favorte playstation game "updating"'.
1. Other apps *ask* if they can update; Steam just does it.
2. Can you justify why Steam should *ever* log me out?
3. re: password managers -- so your answer to my complaint that I have to run/use a second program just to run the one I want... is to install a third app to make the second one less problematic? And: I *have* a password manager: the one built-in to the OS.
Steam sucks.
You can still do that.
I like the convenience, but you need a good broadband connection to keep up.
So the meta-conversation is: why was (is?) installing and running a game so difficult? Why did game-makers suck at that, creating a billion-dollar opportunity for Steam?
But then you may ask, well if Apple has such a standard for everything, why not everything just conform to that and we make everything easier... It's not that simple see: https://xkcd.com/927/
It's not that installing and running a game is 'so difficult' it's that you're expecting it to be as simple as everything else you do in your Apple ecosystem. Because that's how Apple wants it. It's entirely a perspective issue forced upon you by the ecosystem you use.
The end result for all this is all the jokes we see about children expecting everything to be touch screen, or having no idea what to do with a controller when they see one. As humans we adapt to our environment, but if we're always forced into the same systems, we start to expect every system to work that way and we stop adapting.
Opus Magnum is also available on GOG: https://www.gog.com/de/game/opus_magnum
EDIT: It is additionally available on itch.io: https://zachtronics.itch.io/opus-magnum
>Steam opens a very primitive, very non-Mac-like dialog
Macos is less than 1% of the PC gaming market. The decision to port to macos at all is questionable, spending extra effort to really "feel" like a mac native app would be crazy.
Your experience is bad because you are not the target market.
1. Take a look at https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/
2. If you'd like to be able to start the game without Steam using that, go through https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/-/issues/12... which may or may not work.
Otherwise, your sentiment is shared, Steam is a horrible Rube Goldberg machine. I've given up on it myself.
(A veiled reference to ARC-AGI with my usual cynicism).
Edit: to make this comment a bit more substantial it looks to me like Opus Magnum is a game where the player must design a custom solver for a puzzle, so it makes sense that there would be "bots" automating the process (where basically writing a bot replaces the game interface with a programming language). The challenge would be in designing a bot that can solve entire classes of Opus Magnum puzzles, maybe even the entire class. In modern AI everything has been done by learning so an "AI programmer" would typically try to machine-learn such a general solver. Unfortunately that is an open problem for modern AI, how to learn general solvers for entire classes of problems.
On the other hand, I note that the competition is based on what I understand are procedurally generated puzzles. Now, a program that can generate puzzles should also be able to solve puzzles (in the same way that an automaton that can recognise a string can generate it). Learning to identify a generator from example of its output is an open problem in AI. Learning to identify a solver from examples of its output when run as a generator is, well, even more open.
Anyway all this is too much like work for me to be a fun challenge.
I immediately recognized the puzzle as an elephant and quickly pieced them together.
"Good!" he said. "I'll mark that as almost perfect."
"Almost perfect?" I exclaimed.
"Come on. You're not God, " he replied.
Perfect scores are much more common in hard science and maths, where it is usually a simple matter of answering correctly to every question, but some teachers are still hesitant and may find some tiny imperfection to justify a "19/20".
I think it is becoming a thing of the past as perfect scores are becoming more common, but it was a time where getting a perfect 20/20 in philosophy for the baccalauréat was literally newsworthy, as in, it gets talked about on national news.